The present invention relates to satellite communications systems, and more particularly to radio frequency communications between a gateway and a plurality of subscriber terminals via a satellite.
The vast majority of subscribers in urban or suburban areas are served by either hybrid fiber coaxial, cable, or ADSL networks. Both cable and ADSL rely on physical wires to provide network access. The capital expenditure depends on the geographic distance between subscribers and access nodes. The infrastructure cost is shared by all subscribers residing in the area. When the subscriber density is low such as in the rural or remote areas, the wired infrastructures are too costly to be deployed. An alternative solution is providing services via satellite.
The satellite is conceptually similar to a base station in a cellular communications network, where the base station is located at a very high altitude above the earth. A geostationary (GEO) satellite is in orbit about 36,000 km above the equator, and its revolution around the earth is synchronized with the earth's rotation. Therefore, the GEO satellite appears stationary, i.e., fixed on the earth's surface.
Like a cellular infrastructure, a satellite network can divide the covered geography (footprint) into many smaller footprints using multi-beam antennas. A gateway in the footprint of one spot beam can communicate with subscriber terminals in the footprint of other spot beams. The term spot beam refers to a directional radiation pattern provided by a satellite antenna in which the area of the geographical coverage is constrained to a footprint having a direct line of sight to the satellite. The spot beams can carry two-way communications, sent in packets at specific time intervals and allotted frequencies. And all wireless technologies for cellular communications such as CDMA, FDMA and TDMA technologies and the combination thereof can also be applied to the satellite communication. Similar to cellular communication networks that employ frequency reuse to maximize bandwidth efficiency, a satellite communication system has the additional advantage of employing orthogonal polarization to increase the bandwidth.
A satellite communications system has many parameters to work with: (1) number of orthogonal time or frequency slots (defined as color patterns hereinafter); (2) beam spacing (characterized by the beam roll-off at the crossover point); (3) frequency re-use patterns (the re-use patterns can be regular in structures, where a uniformly distributed capacity is required); and (4) number of beams (a satellite with more beams will provide more system flexibility and better bandwidth efficiency, but requires more transponders and amplifiers that are in general traveling-wave tubes amplifiers (TWTAs). TWTAs are expensive and consume power that must be supplied on-board the satellite.
The prior art satellite communications systems take the approach of maximizing a symbol energy-to-noise-plus-interference (SINR) to the worst-case location within a beam. This approach leads to an increased cost in subscriber terminals (STs) because the receiver at the STs will be over-designed to cope with the worst-case condition. Another approach is to divide the available bandwidth into multiple small frequency ranges (different color patterns) and space them apart to reduce interference. This approach will reduce the available frequency bandwidth for each spot beam and require a large amount of TWTs and TWTAs, therefore require a large power supply on-board the satellite.
Design approaches of prior satellite systems typically do not take into account the effects that various system parameters have on the data-carrying capacity of spot beams. Indeed, choices made in the selection of particular system parameters may significantly reduce capacity performance, especially in an interference-dominated environment. Thus, there is a need for techniques that allow system parameter adjustments to be found that will improve data-carrying capacity.